Objects fly through the air, stars wheel through the universe. All fall eventually. If we become obsessed with definitively mastering the decline, we are lost. If we achieve peace within the intervals of rising and falling, we find grace.

(Arthur Chandler, On the Symbolism of Juggling: The Moral and Aesthetic Implications of the Mastery of Falling Objects. http://www.juggling.org/papers/symbolism/)

In the minor arcana of the Rider Waite tarot deck, a juggler is depicted, in the act of balancing, exchanging, juggling the flow of energy between two large coins. In more ancient decks, The Juggler (now more commonly titled The Magician) was considered a symbolic entity important enough to be placed in the front of the archetypal gallery of Major Arcana.

The cards are said to represent balance, as a positive action. Reversed, the card implies imbalance, the need to recover the center and rhythms necessary to keep the balls steady and flowing movement through the air between human hands. The message of the Juggler is this:

Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play, make every yoke that you have accepted easy, and every burden that you carry light.
(Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, p. 8)

The conception of medical, physiological homeostasis permeates psychological diagnosis. Traditional western psychology and psychiatry seek to identify and quantify the archetype of a perfectly balanced mind, as well as create diagnostic codes for all the ever multiplying transient or enduring ways that we can find ourselves out of balance. Even the Diagnostic Manual’s Global Assessment of Functioning Scale (which assigns all human functioning a number between 1 and 100 – 1 equaling imminent death and 100 representing The Perfectly Balanced Human) evokes the archetypal Master Juggler:

100-91 Superior functioning in a wide range of activities, life’s problems never seem to get out of hand, is sought out by others because of his or her many positive qualities. (DSM IV Global Assesment of Functioning Scale – emphasis mine)

And certainly, a preoccupation with the processes of balance, counterbalance and imbalance in all its forms: equivalence, compensation, correspondence, fairness, justice, homeostasis, equilibrium, equality, symmetry, evenness, centeredness, quid pro quo, and tit for tat have been woven into the very fabric of all psychotherapeutic contemplation.

In Freudian thought all dreams, slips and symptoms are potential solutions to states of internal imbalance. The uncoordinated triplet team of consciousness – Id, Ego, Superego – attempt to pass and juggle conflicting needs between each other. One member aggressive and full of appetite, another practical and concerned with working the crowd, and the third, the conscience of the troupe trying to keep the other two in check. A symptom, in this model, is merely one aspect of the self over-correcting for the wild toss of another. The analytic therapist’s job is to help the bickering internal troupe get their act together.

For Jung, dreams, and unconscious phenomena are acts of counterbalance and compensation for whichever stance we have consciously identified with. The Unconscious swings and tilts to balance out whatever it is we believe to be true about ourselves in our waking Conscious life.

In narrative, social and environmental therapies the circle widens. The individual is embedded in a system which is inherently out of balance. Personal imbalance is seen as an extension of and appropriately reactive to injustice, narrative burden, unsustainability, or unconscious guilt stemming from being the un-entitled beneficiary of or hoarding resources without true entitlement.

And each of these seem to me, as always, to be single facets of a still incomplete truth, all of them more incomplete without the others.

An overcommitment to consciously maintaining personal balance creates its own form of disease: A life that is seemingly, superficially never “out of hand” simply banishes chaos to its hidden depths.

A perfectly and consistently balanced human, if one were to exist, would be inert, fixed, stagnant, immobile, inanimate. How monstrously impervious this perfectly balanced human, would be, more of a “thing” than a “who.”

The existential therapies remind us that we are no thing, nothing at all, and that teetering on the brink of meaninglessness, discombobulation and existential dizziness are necessary to apprehend the brevity of our lives, and begin to take real responsibility for our choices and our effect upon each other.

Some ascetic Sadhus, Hindu holy men, spend many years standing on one foot, discovering the balance that can only emerge from negotiating an asymmetrical stance.

Life is inherently out of hand; death, illness, pain, loss, grief, war, disasters natural and man-made, trauma, heartbreak, abuse, cruelty, racism, sexism homophobia and heteronormativity, oppression and injustice in all its forms, including the depletion, exploitation, and hoarding of the earth’s resources. In the face of all that life can throw at you there are times when blatant mental imbalance is the sanest, healthiest most healing response.

We are all embedded in enormous systems, familial, social and planetary, which are also cycling, swinging wildly, falling in and out and passing through imbalance, equilibrium and back again. Living and breathing balance requires and contains imbalance within it.

We will all lose our footing.

No one is impervious. We will all drop the ball.

The universal deadly sin of every routine is The Drop. Dropping is so common in juggling that every performer must come to terms with the inevitable accident that breaks the rhythm of the routine and calls one’s skill into question.
Since drops are inevitable, and even the most accomplished professional jugglers drop in public performance of their routines, one might well ask why a drop should be considered such a disaster.

Part of the reason has to do with the psychological interaction between the audience and the performer….Admiration for the juggler becomes submerged in the more general feeling of wonder at what the human mind and body can accomplish together. It is the overcoming of gravity with style and grace, and produces the kind of internal affirmation that comes with any art or sport done supremely well.

The drop breaks the spell. The audience is reminded of human fallibility when the juggler has to stop and start all over again. Now the creeping doubt has entered everyone’s mind: will the juggler drop again? The second drop confirms this doubt, and the audience now sees only a struggling human being endeavoring to ward off disaster. After the third drop, even the memory of the magic is gone, as both performer and audience only wait for the ordeal to conclude.
(Arthur Chandler, On the Symbolism of Juggling: The Moral and Aesthetic Implications of the Mastery of Falling Objects. http://www.juggling.org/papers/symbolism/)

Extreme imbalance, too many too repetitive “drops” become destructive in their own way. They break down the faith that others have in us, along with our faith in ourselves, our resilience and the world around us.

One of the most common early by-products of imbalance in intimate personal relationships is resentment. If the spirit of quid pro quo is violated, exploited, or ignored, and the energetic, logistical and personal exchange becomes too chronically lopsided resentment compounds, festers and mutates into toxic contempt, hopelessness, and love-killing exhaustion.

Learning how to make necessary corrections and adjustments to preserve the loving core of intimacy is the work of couples and family therapists: Do I accept and try to accommodate the low ball, hold out for a higher toss, or stop trying to feed my partner the ball in just the way they demand it? Should I ask for more, settle for what I’m getting or give less?

When one member of a family or social system changes their rhythm or their stance – the entire network is thrown out of its precarious homeostasis, everyone reels and teeters. “Change back!!” they seem to cry, as their footholds crumble out from under them. A deeper equilibrium, a truer justice often requires that we mourn the loss of an unjust balance and pass through a period of disorienting imbalance before we find a stance that allows everyone to have some part of their need acknowledged and met.

Our relationships, and perhaps Love itself require some balancing component in order to thrive, and without it, we will too soon reach breaking points, beyond which the old center can never be recovered.

We hold many apparently imbalanced relationships as sacred in the service of growth and nurturance: Parent and child, teacher and student, sponsor and sponsee, therapist and client. There are vast power differentials, discrepancies in knowledge and experience and attention, the most obvious giving flows in one direction. Yet, there are symmetries, larger circles of justice exchange and evenhandedness at play: Someone gave this to me, so I now give it to you. In caring for you, I care for untended aspects of myself.

The mystic symbol of justice, that is equivalence and equation of guilt and punishment. …In its most common form two equal scales balanced symmetrically on either side of a central pivot. A Dictionary of Symbols, J. E. Cirlot

All of our theologies and most of our philosophies circle around cycles of cosmic balance and justice. We construct an evenhanded tit for tat, eye for an eye, the equivalence of opposites: Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil. Alternately we embrace the long view of cyclic karmic justice: what goes around comes around. Souls are weighed and balanced in the afterlife in the mythic psychostasis: in ancient Egyptian cosmology, the human heart is weighed on cosmic scales against the feather of Maat, the goddess of order and justice – while a monster “waits below the scale, ready to devour the unbalanced heart.” (The Book of Symbols The Archive for research in archetypal symbolism pp. 512)

Individual psychological equipoise and the ultimate cosmic balance intersect to complete the hermetic formulae and the Master Juggler’s circuit: As it is above, so it is below. As it is below so it is above, As it was in the beginning, so it will be at the end. As it is within, so it is without.

The therapist, is only supposedly, a skilled juggler and juggling teacher – able to keep many balls in the air, managing their own internal and external challenges to equanimity and flow while incorporating all that the client throws at them, and passing back the ball at the right speed, spin and rhythm so that the client can receive it, polish up their own act, and expand their bag of tricks. Therapists make split second assessments as to whether a client is trapped in sticky bullshit stasis, if they need to pushed off of a false-too-comfortable standpoint – or if they are reeling too near to dangerous overwhelming imbalance requiring all the therapist’s skills to help them stabilize. Young clinicians often wonder, when they have fallen on their asses, in life or in session, if they themselves are stable enough to go forward in the work.

I am no Master Juggler although in session I have learned to keep quite a few balls up in the air. Usually just one or two more than any given client, (although sometimes, admittedly, I must scramble to keep ahead).

Just as the Juggler or magician has had to train and work for along time before attaining the ability of concentration without effort, similarly, he who makes use of the method of analogy on the intellectual plane must have worked much, i.e. to have acquired long experience.
(Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, p.10)

I’d better at least look like I’m good at it by now. I’ve been practicing almost everyday for nearly two decades – and perhaps for long stretches I can manage to appear as if it never gets out of hand.

But it does. Of course it does. I get knocked off my pins, blown off my center, lose my flow and rhythm and toss out ill-timed passes with humbling regularity.

The drop is inevitable.

And although I can still be shaken when my act has inadvertently slipped into an ordeal for the most part I have learned to enjoy the momentary peace within intervals of rising and falling.